


Lower Animals

by scioscribe



Category: Dark Tower - Stephen King, Salem's Lot - Stephen King
Genre: Crossover, F/F, Fix-It of Sorts, Society for the Protection of Susans, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-15
Updated: 2020-09-15
Packaged: 2021-03-06 16:27:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,047
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26471863
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: “Are you a witch?” Susan asked her, when she first groggily came to. Her head was pillowed on Susan Norton’s still blood-smeared thigh; the gash she’d sucked from was already a black scab, iridescent like a beetle’s shell.“I hope not,” Susan Norton said. “What I am is bad enough already.”
Relationships: Susan Delgado/Susan Norton
Comments: 4
Kudos: 18
Collections: King of Exchanges 2020





	Lower Animals

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cygnes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cygnes/gifts).



After the fire, the first thing Susan remembered was water. She cried out when it touched her lips, wetting the cracks the heat had baked into them. Had the pain left her mad, then, that she thought she heard the water hiss against her skin, thought she saw white steam curl up in the air?

The next thing she remembered was blood.

There was a woman kneeling before her. She had long, tangled hair and there was mud caked on her legs and the hem of her skirt. She smelled like copper and wood and dust, and as she leaned closer, Susan realized she also smelled a little like horses—stables, she smelled like she’d been sleeping in a stable, and nothing in the world was sweeter comfort to Susan than that mingling of horseshit and hay.

She closed her eyes, ready to die thinking about that. A barn full of good threaded stock, all of them nuzzling their soft velvety lips against her hands as she slipped them apples or carrots.

But the coppery smell got stronger and stronger, making the stables fade away into the dark. It wasn’t copper at all. It was the butcher-shop smell, not the stable but the slaughterhouse.

There was a question, then, and Susan understood why the woman had given her the water: it wasn’t kindness so much as necessity. She needed Susan’s throat wet enough for her to talk. She needed to hear Susan’s answer.

Susan gave it: “Aye.”

Hot liquid sputtered against her burned, ruined mouth, and it tasted _foul_.

All medicine did, when you got right down to it.

Susan drank. She drank until she was strong enough for the woman to drink from her in turn, and when she did, Susan threw her head back and breathed hard.

* * *

The woman’s name was also Susan.

There were more than a few girls in the Barony named Susan, but all the same, it was enough of a coincidence to make Susan Delgado wonder if Susan Norton had really found her by chance, as she said she had.

“Are you a witch?” Susan asked her, when she first groggily came to. Her head was pillowed on Susan Norton’s still blood-smeared thigh; the gash she’d sucked from was already a black scab, iridescent like a beetle’s shell.

“I hope not,” Susan Norton said. “What I am is bad enough already.” She brushed some of Susan’s hair off her face and then thumbed some of her own blood from the corner of Susan’s mouth. “And what I am is what you are now, too. It’s no picnic.” She smiled wryly: _here I am,_ the smile seemed to say, _and I’ll never have a picnic again._ _But that’s life, isn’t it?_

Yes. Life. Susan guessed it was.

“Then again, we might be witches.” Her hand rested on Susan’s neck, covering up the wound like she didn’t want to look at it. “Things work differently here. Back in my world, you wouldn’t have had to drink from me first. And you would have been—different. Afterwards.” She made a face that Susan only saw upside-down, mostly as a flattening out of her chin. “I remember some of it, before I got here. It was just hunger. Nothing but hunger.”

“I’m hungry,” Susan said.

“But you’re other things too. You’re still you.” The other Susan sounded surer of that than Susan herself felt.

But if she wasn’t herself, would it really be because she lost a little blood? She’d done that before. She hadn’t lived wadded-about in cotton, to go her whole life without any cuts or scratches.

That she’d drunk of the other Susan’s blood—that could have changed her. Mayhap it had made her monstrous, and she was sure it had made her hungry. But what had cut her loose of her history, made her no longer Susan Delgado of Mejis but Susan of the Susans, a blood-red girl with sharp teeth, was something else. It was Hambry. They had given her up, that was all. She’d seen those she’d known her whole life ready to burn her alive, and it was just possible they’d done it after all. She felt like the girl who would smell horses before she would smell blood was a girl a long way away from her.

* * *

It was the rats, Susan explained later, that had freed her from the _charyou_ tree.

Rats—all inquisitive black eyes and twitching noses—would obey them now, if they were nudged the right way. Susan had sent a flood of them towards the fire, holding their minds tight in hers so that those little bubbles of pain and building panic never quite burst. They descended on that bright and burning girl whose young love and certainty did not quite belong to the Susan-who-now-was; they gnawed the ropes to pieces.

They, as much as Susan Norton, had rescued her from death, and Susan tried to be grateful for that. The rats huddled around them, whenever they slept through the days—disused stables and musty cellars and badger holes trimmed with worms—and Susan would sometimes pet them as she fell asleep. She had gone from smelling like horses to smelling like rats, and she doubted anyone else would find that a nice change. But the horses were scared of her now, and the rats were not.

Life as a rat would be different from life as a horse. More burrowing, less sunlight. Less loved and more hunted. But rats survived, and as close as she had come to death, Susan saw the advantages of that.

* * *

Susan Norton was nothing like Roland Deschain, except when it came to her hands.

“I used to like to draw,” Susan said, when Susan asked her about it, about the steadiness and nimbleness of her fingers, the way her calluses were from one thing, not from general work like Susan’s own. “I wanted to be—I _was_ —a commercial artist. They’re the people who draw things like book covers and cartoon tomatoes telling you to try-a the pizza—and you don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?”

She shook her head. One word in every five or so. That was another thing—Roland had come from the starch-and-gilt of Gilead, from a Barony older and grander than Susan’s own, but Susan Norton was from another world entirely.

“You’ve seen signs, right? Ones with pictures on them, not just words?”

“Aye.”

“Let’s say I painted those—the good ones, anyway. Things like that. If my hands still look like they know what they’re doing, that’s why.” She looked away from the kill they were splitting between them, a mottling of blood staining her mouth. She had still had a bit of a honeyed look to her skin when they had first met, but that was gone now. Neither of them had seen the sun in a long time, and Susan Norton’s complexion was like the inside of an apple, a somehow inviting yellow-white that looked made to be bitten into. If she could see herself, she would have to paint her portrait, Susan Delgado thought—she wouldn’t be able to help it.

“You could still draw,” Susan suggested. “We come by paper, sometimes.”

“Not much. And it doesn’t matter, anyway: what we _don’t_ come by, ever, is the right light.”

“Candles and lamps.” But Susan often complained of it being dark, even when they found an empty cottage for the night and lit up the house until it was, to Susan Delgado, a dazzling gold. The lights in Susan’s old world had been different, somehow brighter. And of course they no longer had the sun. “I know it’s not what you’re used to, but you can learn.”

“Isn’t that the truth, and aren’t we Exhibit A and Exhibit B for it,” Susan Norton murmured. “Maybe I’m tired of being taught things, even by myself.” She bent her head again, the lovely corded muscles of her neck standing out, and supped once more.

But she did take what paper there was to be had, that night, and a few nights later, with a bit of charcoal, she began ashy-black sketches: drawings of Susan, mostly. Susan folded them up and kept them inside her shift, close to her breast, where they rustled with a crisp sound that became her new heartbeat.

Susan Norton was nothing like Roland Deschain, but Susan Delgado began to love her anyway. She hadn’t known she would be that kind of woman, but then, she’d scarcely begun to be a woman at all.

* * *

Mejis was ranch-land, farmland, so Susan had never done much hunting. But it didn’t go too much against the grain for her to take livestock where she had to. She did most of their pilfering, then, when they needed to eat and game was scarce. Someday she guessed she would get her prey the way the other Susan did, tracking mutie deer through the woods and taking them with just her hands and teeth, but she wasn’t quite there yet.

“Dad took me with him once,” Susan Norton said, “and I shot somewhere within half a mile of a pheasant, and that was enough for me. Until now. This is bloodier, but it’s more … sporting.”

They lived off deer and beeves and stolen chickens, rabbits and squirrels and birds when times were harder. Susan Norton had said that where she’d come from, when the ones like them had spread in like a plague, it was only eating people that had gotten anyone noticed, and that only barely: _just us, we were the only ones who cared._

Susan Delgado had warned her that that wouldn’t be so anymore. People in the Outer Baronies had some troubles, but not believing wildness wasn’t one of them. They kenned any explanation for their dead animals and thinned-out deer that put the blame on outsiders. And Susan was proof of what happened when their suspicions rose to a boil.

So they traveled constantly, outpacing the rumors that followed them like a trail of blood.

For years, it was enough.

* * *

They were in Gilead, or at least the place where Gilead had once been, when their past caught up with them. There was a band of hard-bitten followers of the Good Man who squatted in what little was left, and they caught one Susan with her hand in the henhouse and the other with her teeth in the throat of a startled elk. Susan Delgado, stinking of chicken-shit, was called a thief; Susan Norton, dressed in blood, was called worse. They had her chained to the corners of a splintery old gallows, debating what to do with her—whether just cutting off her head would do or whether they would need to burn her as well.

No rat could have gnawed through the iron of those shackles, but Susan Delgado found she didn’t need them to. _She_ , at least, was bound only at the hands.

She progressed in her education that night in a startling leap. She was no longer a rancher’s daughter but a hunter, and she did not even need her hands. She did for Farson’s remaining men with her teeth alone.

By the time she was able to unshackle them both, the bodies were cool, and there was no fresh blood for Susan Norton to drink. She kissed the gore off Susan’s lips instead, licking at her mouth.

She could have been a lady of Gilead, a gunslinger’s wife, if things had been different, but that night she made love on what was left of its gallows. And she had no regrets.

* * *

The world moved on, and so did they. Sometimes, while she was mixing paints for her Susan—reds were the easiest, for there was always blood and often clay to use for pigment—Susan Delgado would feel the earth groan beneath her. The Beams would fail, but she no longer trusted that that would be the end of everything. She had lived past so many ends. The sweet story of her youth, with its firsts and lasts, had been a long time ago.

Let her Roland, if any part of him was still hers, fret over the Tower. Let horses carry him there, if he wished it.

Susan trusted in the rats.


End file.
